In Gaza, the womb has ceased to be a sanctuary. Beneath the scorching plastic of displacement tents, surrounded by air thick with toxic dust from relentless bombardment, carrying new life has transfor...

How much time do we have? That’s always the question — the one the disciples fumbled on the mount, the one my portfolio answers nightly in its decimals.   I’m the managing partner. I have come to talk...

The following letter, dated June 17, 2026, on the subject of Jewish terrorism in the West Bank, was addressed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to his Ministers Israel Katz, Bezalel Smotrich, and ...

In the late 1670s and early 1680s, when John Locke first put pen to paper to work on The Two Treatises of Government, he was grappling with a question unnervingly familiar to contemporary Americans. T...

The following letter, dated June 17, 2026, on the subject of Jewish terrorism in the West Bank, was addressed to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to his Ministers Israel Katz, Bezalel Smotrich, and ...

The Epstein Phenomenon ought to foist the subject of sexual cruelty to the forefront of our consciousness. It is a common cruelty, so common and so awful that we have had to find ways to blind ourselv...

In April 1989, my mother went to the gate at O’Hare to greet Yukiko Sugihara. Yukiko was 75 and my mother turned 80 a few months earlier. Although they had never met before, they recognized each other...

The Epstein Phenomenon ought to foist the subject of sexual cruelty to the forefront of our consciousness. It is a common cruelty, so common and so awful that we have had to find ways to blind ourselv...

The Epstein Phenomenon ought to foist the subject of sexual cruelty to the forefront of our consciousness. It is a common cruelty, so common and so awful that we have had to find ways to blind ourselv...

I This year’s Berlin International Film Festival opened on a rare sunny winter’s day in the German capital. In the early afternoon of February 12, the international jury, led by its president Wim Wend...

Book reviewing, it would seem, has been in crisis from the start. As early as 1757, a contributor to Britain’s Literary Magazine complained that “critic is no longer an appellation of dignity,” becaus...

I. Live long enough and eventually people will come calling and start asking you questions. In the last decades of his very long life — ninety years, from 1898 to 1989 — the editor and critic Malcolm ...

Is it possible to create an artistic masterpiece whose content is morally and politically loathsome? If so, what should we make of such art? I can think of one clear example: Birth of a Nation, the si...

I. Wind turbines do not “cause cancer.” Offshore wind farms are not “driving whales loco.” And wind power is not “the most expensive form of energy,” no matter what the president of the United States ...

David Foster Wallace said that life as a famous writer is comparable to working as a TV weatherman in a mid-sized city. You’re only recognized when you are “in the right place at the right time.” Desp...

For many of Palestine’s supporters in the world, Hamas is a “resistance movement.” It is the armed faction that fires rockets at Israel, that refuses to bow to a siege (the same siege to which it cont...

For many of Palestine’s supporters in the world, Hamas is a “resistance movement.” It is the armed faction that fires rockets at Israel, that refuses to bow to a siege (the same siege to which it cont...

In loving memory of Irwin Berl Nadler, 1952-2023 There are moments — small, almost absurd moments — when one realizes that one has crossed a threshold, a personal, religious, historical, or intellectu...

Yasujirō Ozu is from a different time and place in the sense that in the place where he is from, time does not behave the way our time does. Shigehiko Hasumi, the Japanese literary and film critic and...

I. Wind turbines do not “cause cancer.” Offshore wind farms are not “driving whales loco.” And wind power is not “the most expensive form of energy,” no matter what the president of the United States ...

Yasujirō Ozu is from a different time and place in the sense that in the place where he is from, time does not behave the way our time does. Shigehiko Hasumi, the Japanese literary and film critic and...

Yasujirō Ozu is from a different time and place in the sense that in the place where he is from, time does not behave the way our time does. Shigehiko Hasumi, the Japanese literary and film critic and...

“I am no more than a secretary of the invisible thing.” Czesław Miłosz begins one of his poems with this evocative declaration of artistic vocation. In this spare statement, the poet abandons any pret...

I. Wind turbines do not “cause cancer.” Offshore wind farms are not “driving whales loco.” And wind power is not “the most expensive form of energy,” no matter what the president of the United States says. It’s one of the cheapest. Donald Trump tells lots of dopey lies about wind. “If you have a windmill...

Book reviewing, it would seem, has been in crisis from the start. As early as 1757, a contributor to Britain’s Literary Magazine complained that “critic is no longer an appellation of dignity,” because book reviewers had turned into “Visigoths,” “critical torturers” who took “malicious pleasure” in tearing authors apart. A century and a half later,...

If, as we are told in Genesis, God created form from formlessness, and gave spirit to blank matter, then it is the puppeteer whose powers achieve something like the divine. Manipulating fingers, strin...

Mary Shelley was a child of the Enlightenment, literally. She was the daughter of two radicals, the great philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, and political philosopher William Godwin. Famously, Shelley’s...

David Foster Wallace said that life as a famous writer is comparable to working as a TV weatherman in a mid-sized city. You’re only recognized when you are “in the right place at the right time.” Desp...

Before the author Klaus Mann was labeled a mongrel, a queer, a junkie, a communist, and in the curious judgment of the FBI, a “premature anti-Fascist,” he found himself tarred with perhaps the crueles...

Before the author Klaus Mann was labeled a mongrel, a queer, a junkie, a communist, and in the curious judgment of the FBI, a “premature anti-Fascist,” he found himself tarred with perhaps the crueles...

Before the author Klaus Mann was labeled a mongrel, a queer, a junkie, a communist, and in the curious judgment of the FBI, a “premature anti-Fascist,” he found himself tarred with perhaps the crueles...

If you want a surefire way to incite hostility on social media, I suggest flaunting the fact that you work nights and weekends — or complaining about those who do. The sea of humans will suddenly part before you into two angry mobs: the workaholics, who are prepared to sacrifice their lives at the altar of capitalism, and the restaholics, whose highest ideal is slacking off and who seethe with resentment at those ruining the curve. Or so the two groups understand one another. Do we work in order to rest, or do we rest in order to work? Neither answer is very appealing. Working in order to rest sounds like a paraphrase of Freud’s death drive: as though, in an ideal world, we would just be sitting quietly, motionlessly, imitating corpses. Resting in order to work suggests the equally depressing thesis that the goal of a human life is to become a well-oiled cog in some kind of machine, a tool for the use of the leviathan called society. We need to work, because survival demands it, and we need to rest, because work is tiring, but are those two possibilities really exhaustive? Isn’t there a third state — one that we don’t need but freely choose? When I teach book ten of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, I explain to the students that if they want to understand Aristotle’s concept of leisure — scholē — they need only look in the mirror. As students, they are leading scholastic lives, which is to say, lives of leisure. They balk at this: it might be true that the Greek word scholē is the source of the English “school,” but they cannot see how a lifestyle centered around grades and exams and being forced to read chapter after chapter of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics could count as leisurely. Like the workaholics and the restaholics, my students fail to leave room for a third possibility: when they deny that school is leisurely what they really mean to deny is that school is restful. And they are right about that, even on a capacious understanding of rest, one which extends well beyond sleep to include everything they classify under “self-care” — exercise, meditation, “me-time,” therapy, unplugging — as well as humor, games, trivial amusements or hobbies, vacations, and all those activities whose attraction lies in being “fun.” School is not like any of those things; it might sometimes happen to be calming or relaxing or amusing, but it is not that way essentially. But school is also not like work, not even if we have a capacious understanding of “work,” inclusive of training for work. We forget almost everything we learn in school, and even if we didn’t forget it, little of it would be useful to us in our jobs. Some people claim that school trains you in “analytical skills” or “critical thinking”; others say it instills the obedience and the conformity and the submission necessary for most modern jobs. If school does those things, it does them behind the scenes, while you are busy learning not how to be submissive or critical but how to understand calculus or economics or the causes of World War I. Just as playing video games would not be work even if it turned out that (unbeknownst to the players), it trained someone to have fighter pilot reflexes, school is not work even if you do end up with some abilities that are relevant for work. Aristotle is not stymied by our chicken-egg problem. Faced with the work-rest cycle, he sees a clear teleological winner: fun and relaxation are all for the sake of returning to work, and the reverse is simply not the case. Now to exert oneself and work for the sake of amusement seems silly and utterly childish. But to amuse oneself in order that one may exert oneself, as Anacharsis puts it, seems right; for amusement is a sort of relaxation, and we need relaxation because we cannot work continuously. Relaxation, then, is not an end; for it is taken for the sake of activity. Aristotle chalks up our affinity for relaxation to the lamentable fact that mortal beings are incapable of continuous activity: we need to take breaks from doing what matters to us. A person who worked in order to relax would be getting the proper order of things backwards, like a person who cooks dinner in order to go grocery shopping again. We shop in order to cook, and not vice versa. Likewise, if we see a person working, then relaxing, then working, and so on, the charitable interpretation, says Aristotle, is to assume that she is relaxing in order to get back to work. Relaxing activities may, at times, feel more enjoyable than the work they relieve us from; nonetheless, proclaims Aristotle “no one would live for the sake of trivial amusements.” The point of life can’t lie in the breaks we take from it. But now consider work — and I am using the word broadly, as a catchall to describe both what happens in the office and also all the various forms of biological or social necessity that show up in our lives as problems needing to be solved. Getting young kids dressed in snow gear, deciding which chores to do in what order, maintaining a friendly face at a social gathering: those can all be forms of work. Work is activity that manages constraints and tradeoffs to pursue goals of social value — which means the story can’t end there. The question remains: what are we working for? The answer cannot be more work, because that simply postpones the question, much less rest, which is done for the sake of work. There must be a human activity that is done for its own sake, and this activity has got to serve as the teleological lynchpin of the whole system. Aristotle calls it “leisure,” or scholē. What is leisure? The phrase “leisure time” is familiar enough, as is ### Subscribe Now #### Start a Digital Subscription Now Only $5 a month for full access to the _Liberties'_ digital archive and all future issues online. Subscribe Now #### Subscribe to Print & Digital Get a discount with an annual print subscription and you'll receive four beautiful issues of _Liberties_ , a free archival issue, and full digital access. Subscribe Now #### Register for a Free Sample Just enter your email to read one essay per month and receive our weekly newsletter. Register Now

In the 1930s, as now, the world preferred not to notice the obvious. The cost of that willful blindness was 75,000,000 dead. Our blindness is no less willful today, and this time we are practicing it ...

The name Giuliano Da Empoli might not mean much to American readers, but in Europe the Swiss-Italian writer has established himself as one of the continent’s most fêted political and intellectual comm...

Mary Shelley was a child of the Enlightenment, literally. She was the daughter of two radicals, the great philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft, and political philosopher William Godwin. Famously, Shelley’s...

In the 1930s, as now, the world preferred not to notice the obvious. The cost of that willful blindness was 75,000,000 dead. Our blindness is no less willful today, and this time we are practicing it ...

“Our most sincere film can seem phony.” When François Truffaut wrote that in 1975 he could have been describing Hollywood’s long and largely sorry history of prestige pictures that, at least in the mi...